He is the Jets’ highest-paid receiver, and has a legitimate chance to be their leading receiver, as well. It is a role he has never truly occupied, since Demaryius Thomas was Manning’s top target in Denver the past two seasons.

During that time, Thomas had 186 catches for 2,864 yards and 24 touchdowns. Decker’s numbers over that span weren’t much different: 172 catches for 2,352 yards and 24 touchdowns.

Manning arrived in Denver in 2012. The year before that was Decker’s second season in the NFL. He accumulated 44 catches, 612 yards and eight touchdowns. He led the Broncos in all three categories, as Thomas ranked second in all three (32 catches, 551 yards, four touchdowns).

Jets coach Rex Ryan is adamant that Decker was a very good player well before Manning joined the Broncos.

“Everybody can say (his statistics) are skewed a little bit because of Manning, and that might be true,” Ryan said. “But I think he did catch eight touchdowns when (Tim) Tebow was quarterback. I think that’s pretty impressive.”

Except that line about Tebow isn’t true.

Tebow was on the Broncos’ roster in 2010 and 2011, before his ill-fated one-year stint with the Jets. During Decker’s rookie season, 2010, his lone touchdown catch came from Tebow. In Decker’s second season, his first four touchdown catches came from Kyle Orton, and his last four came from Tebow.

Five of Decker’s touchdown catches in his first two years came from Tebow. Not eight.

But Ryan’s point remains: Decker caught touchdown passes from quarterbacks inferior to Manning (which, by the way, is pretty much every other quarterback in the NFL, including the two men allegedly competing for the Jets’ starting job, Geno Smith and Michael Vick).

“Eric has been productive in this league even before Peyton,” Ryan said. “And obviously in college, I don’t know if he led the country in receptions or not, but he certainly was up there.”

Decker was a third-round draft pick out of Minnesota. His best season there was his junior year, 2008, when he caught 84 passes for 1,074 yards and seven touchdowns. That season, he ranked No. 21 nationally in catches (the leader had 111) and No. 22 in yards (the leader had 1,538).

It obviously isn’t Ryan’s job to have Decker’s stats from his college and Denver days memorized. And you can’t blame Ryan for wanting to tout his new receiver, while defending Decker against claims that he was a product of Manning’s brilliance.

The bottom line remains: Decker was at his best when Manning threw him passes. It remains to be seen how much that resulted from Manning being a first-ballot Hall of Famer, versus Decker’s own improvement during his third and fourth seasons in the NFL.

These late-May questions about whether Decker can thrive without Manning – and assertions about how good Decker was before Manning teamed with him – don’t really matter all that much. In about three months, when the Jets open their season at home against the Raiders, they will begin to get their only answers of consequence about Decker.